Trigger Warning: Mentions of suicide and self-harm

My symptoms of mental health conditions did not begin to surface until I started college at the age of 19. For the first two years, they were relatively dormant until I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) on self-harm and suicidal obsessions when I was 21 and starting my fall semester in 2014.

I ultimately bring this up because I want to say that I knew what life was like before the reign of a mental health condition. In 2015 I started the next few years of my life with multiple hospitalizations. I went in and out of treatments–such as medication adjustments, hospital stays, exposure-response-prevention treatments for the OCD, therapy appointments twice a week for a year, a stay for five weeks at the OCD-Institute, and a few repeated partial programs. I self-harmed on and off during the duration of my time in treatment, attempted suicide multiple times, and didn’t always stay as safe as I could.

It was a whirlwind of years to which I lost my identity. I became so obsessed and enthralled by the idea of suicide that I began to identify as a suicidal blob that had something to prove and could only prove so by acting on my thoughts.

At the start of 2018 I fell back into a darker spiral than usual, a deeper depression where I genuinely no longer believed in hope, peace, and stability. I wrote articles that were out of character, I wrote journal entries about my thoughts, and fantasized with a glorified perception of my final acts.

But luckily for me, I was given an ultimatum by family to enter myself into the hospital, and I took it. Within the next week I began a partial program where almost a month later I would return to and confess suicidal plans and enter into the hospital once again.

In three years I had 12 hospitalizations and four minor suicide attempts.

In preparing for this article, I thought 2016 was the year I went nine months hospital free, but the more I think about it, the more I don’t think that was the case at all.

If the latter is true, this is the first time in almost four years where I have been solidified in stability for the last six months like feet in wet cement. I have been so stable for such an accrued amount of time that I’ve gotten a glimpse into what life without a chronic illness is like again. And, god, is it freeing.

In six months I have reshaped and transformed my identity. I have juggled many media of art like an expert, I have written copious amounts of fan fiction, I’ve done photography shoots, completed a summer course, returned to “In Our Own Voice” presentations, and made new friends.

The effort, time, patience, compassion, and self-love that I’ve implemented into my life as I’ve attended my day program three days a week for the past six months has been life-changing. The program at Passages has been life-saving for me. I have truly blossomed, grown, and been made better again.

For an undetermined amount of time I’ve been attending the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Intensive Program at Passages that meets for review of homework assignments, lecture, and diary cards (a tracking system for thoughts, urges and feelings, and the usage of skills).  

And in that, my recovery has not been linear. I’ve had a few crises over the summer that I didn’t come out of completely unscathed. Each day is a continual choice to use skills, whether consciously or not, and to maintain my wellness regimen that is centered around no time granted to ruminations, finding activities to keep myself busy, coming up with a score of the day on a one to 10 scale, filling out my planner, journaling my accomplishments of the day as well as filling out my diary card.

With this system in place, I’ve been able to track my time, my days, my emotions, thoughts, and any patterns that have emerged within them. As suicide and scratching forms of self-harm have erased into the background, scalp picking and trichotillomania have taken center stage. The amount of times I’ve lost my brows and eyelashes in the last year is too many to count.

Every day is a new day and, while I still live with mental health conditions, I have learned to not become them anymore. I have also learned that anything I am able to achieve in life is doubly impressive for the obstacles I have to overcome. I have been reaffirmed that my voice is powerful and my story matters, so I continue my work in advocacy and, I hope, being inspirational for others to follow in my footsteps. We are, after all, survivors radiating badassery.